White Oak, Gregg County
The newly freed African Americans of the Shiloh community established a school for their children shortly after the Civil War. The one-room building was demolished in the late 1800s and classes were held at the Shiloh Baptist Church. With financial assistance from the Julius Rosenwald fund, a new two-room school was erected in 1920. It was replaced by a large brick building in the 1930s. The high school was closed in 1949; the end of segregation closed the rest of the Shiloh School in 1966. Shiloh graduates became contributing citizens in Texas and the nation. Long vacant, the school building was later used to store chemicals for a plastics company and burned in 1993. (1998)